Design, engineering and commissioning of industrial plants and corresponding control system is a complex and time consuming process. To simplify the complexities involved, often the engineering is done in phases by various personnel of the automation service provider using various tools. The initial phase involves understanding customer requirements and generating plant specifications by the automation service provider. The automation service provider makes sale proposals by showing prospective plant topology diagrams created and stored using sales proposal tool. The prospective plant topology diagrams are used to present a plant network architecture overview to the customer in order to trigger further sales and bidding discussions in relation to the plant configuration and specifications.
In the subsequent phase, the prospective plant topology diagrams are converted to conventional plant topology diagrams by adding crucial details which are relevant in the context of control engineering and operation. The conventional plant topology diagrams is used by control engineers during configuration and commissioning of the devices of the control system which includes online device/system configuration, remote diagnostics, creation of system, control and hardware structures in the control application tools, export of topology diagram details to operations tools, etc. In this phase a multiplicity of tools are used, each of which has a separate data repository.
Conventionally, the conversion of prospective plant topology diagrams to conventional plant topology diagrams, and the configuration and commissioning of the devices of the control system is done manually by automation and control engineers. This task of conversion and subsequent configuration requires domain knowledge upon the part of the control engineer and therefore involves high skill related costs. Additionally, this task of conversion and subsequent configuration and commissioning of the devices often includes a lot of basic configurations which are redundant and repeatable which are currently performed manually, thereby leading to an inefficient delivery strategy for large scale engineering projects. Further, due to the semantic disconnect between various data models of the various engineering tools it is challenging to determine the dependency of a system element with respect to the system elements outside the tool's database.
Moreover, while performing this task of conversion and subsequent configuration and commissioning of the devices, the control engineer often has to refer to the requirements and configuration rules, plant engineering information such as I/O lists, etc., generated in the preceding phase, dependency among the engineering information and this makes the task time consuming, tedious, inefficient and prone to errors.
There have been several approaches which have attempted to solve the problems mentioned above. However, there is a need for an improved system and method that solves the problems mentioned above.